Late-Time Tails in Nonlinear Evolutions of Merging Black Holes
Creators
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De Amicis, Marina1
- Rüter, Hannes R.2
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Carullo, Gregorio1, 3
- Albanesi, Simone4, 5
- Melize Ferrus, C.6
- Mitman, Keefe7
- Stein, Leo C.8
- Cardoso, Vitor1, 2
- Bernuzzi, Sebastiano4
- Boyle, Michael7
- Deppe, Nils7
- Kidder, Lawrence E.7
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Moxon, Jordan9
- Nagar, Alessandro5, 10
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Nelli, Kyle C.9
- Pfeiffer, Harald P.11
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Scheel, Mark A.9
- Throwe, William7
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Vu, Nils L.9
- Zenginoğlu, An𝚤l12
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1.
University of Copenhagen
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2.
University of Lisbon
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3.
University of Birmingham
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4.
Friedrich Schiller University Jena
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5.
INFN Sezione di Torino
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6.
King's College London
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7.
Cornell University
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8.
University of Mississippi
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9.
California Institute of Technology
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10.
Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques
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11.
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
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12.
University of Maryland, College Park
Abstract
We uncover late-time gravitational-wave tails in fully nonlinear 3+1 dimensional numerical relativity simulations of merging black holes, using the highly accurate p code. We achieve this result by exploiting the strong magnification of late-time tails due to binary eccentricity, recently observed in perturbative evolutions, and showcase here the tail presence in head-on configurations for several mass ratios close to unity. We validate the result through a large battery of numerical tests and detailed comparison with a perturbative evolution, which display striking agreement with full nonlinear ones in the ringdown regime, and very similar tail morphologies. Our results offer yet another confirmation of the highly predictive power of black hole perturbation theory in the presence of a source, even when applied to nonlinear solutions. The late-time tail signal is much more prominent than anticipated until recently, and possibly within reach of gravitational-wave detector measurements, unlocking observational investigations of an additional set of general relativistic predictions on the long-range gravitational dynamics.
Copyright and License
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Acknowledgement
M. D. A. expresses her gratitude to Perimeter Institute for its kind hospitality during the final stages of the manuscript preparation. M. D. A. also thanks Sizheng Ma and Luis Lehner for stimulating discussions on the topic during the visit. S. A. gratefully acknowledges the warm hospitality of the Niels Bohr Institute, where this work was initiated. G. C. acknowledges funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 847523 “INTERACTIONS.” The Center of Gravity is a Center of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation under Grant No. 184. We acknowledge support from the Villum Investigator program by the VILLUM Foundation (Grant No. VIL37766) and the DNRF Chair program (Grant No. DNRF162) by the Danish National Research Foundation. H. R. R. and V. C. acknowledge financial support provided under the European Union’s H2020 ERC Advanced Grant “Black holes: gravitational engines of discovery” Grant Agreement No. Gravitas-101052587. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreements No. 101007855 and No. 101131233. K. M. is supported by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship Grant No. HST-HF2-51562.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA Contract No. NAS5-26555. S. A. acknowledges support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) project “GROOVHY” (BE 6301/5-1 Projektnummer: 523180871). L. C. S. acknowledges support from NSF CAREER Award No. PHY–2047382 and a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. S. B. acknowledges support by the EU Horizon under ERC Consolidator Grant No. InspiReM-101043372 and from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) project “GROOHVY” (BE 6301/5-1 Projektnummer: 523180871). A. Z. is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2309084. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. PHY-2407742, No. PHY-2207342, and No. OAC-2209655 at Cornell. This work was supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation at Cornell. This work was supported in part by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and by NSF Grants No. PHY-2309211, No. PHY-2309231, and No. OAC-2209656 at Caltech. Simulations have been carried out on the Frontera computing system within the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Grant No. PHY20018, “Gravitational Waves from Compact Binaries: Computational Contributions to LIGO.”
Data Availability
spec simulation data are available from Caltech Data [90–95,133–140] and can also be accessed through the sxs python package [89,131].
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material present a series of tests to confirm the robustness of the numerical results shown in the paper.
Additional Information
The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2412.06887 (arXiv)
- Is supplemented by
- Supplemental Material: https://journals.aps.org/prl/supplemental/10.1103/2brx-xnyr/supplemental_material.pdf (URL)
Funding
- European Commission
- 847523
- Danish National Research Foundation
- 184
- Villum Fonden
- VIL37766
- Danish National Research Foundation
- DNRF162
- European Research Council
- Gravitas-101052587
- European Commission
- 101007855
- European Commission
- 101131233
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HST-HF2-51562.001-A
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NAS5-26555
- Space Telescope Science Institute
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- 523180871
- National Science Foundation
- PHY–2047382
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- European Research Council
- InspiReM-101043372
- National Science Foundation
- 2309084
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2407742
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2207342
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-2209655
- Cornell University
- Sherman Fairchild Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2309231
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2309211
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-2209656
- California Institute of Technology
- Texas Advanced Computing Center
- PHY20018
Dates
- Accepted
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2025-09-04